User:Amy Suo Wu/transreal

Taken from Becoming Dragon: A Transversal Technology Study by Micha Cárdenas

Transreal Identities, an Intersection of Becoming and Mixing

A transreal identity is an identity which has components which span multiple realities, multiple realms of expression, and often this is perceived as a rapid shifting or a shimmering, as in the case of a mirage, between multiple conflicting readings. Millions of people today have identities which have significant components which span multiple levels of reality, including Second Life avatars and other virtual worlds. For many, such as the Otherkin or trans-species community, they consider these virtual identities to be their "true selves," more significant than their physical bodies. Yet the notion of transreal can be a way to subvert the very idea of a true self, if one's self contains multiple parts which have different truth values or different kinds of realness. A study at the Virtual Human Interaction Laboratory at Harvard has shown that after only thirty seconds with an "attractive" avatar, people's real world behavior changed. This is just one example of a real identity which has been shaped in part by a virtual world. Any identity in the process of becoming can be thought of as transreal, as it exists in the present but also as potential, in multiple states of reality.

From Baudrillard's statement, "neither real, nor unreal: hyperreal," we can move to both real and unreal, existing in multiple realities, mixing realities, transreal. Transreal identity destabilizes epistemological systems which would privilege real phenomena such as the body or real world social interactions, and extends the necessary field of investigation into virtual, digital and fantasy worlds. Further, perhaps transreal identities can serve to destabilize contemporary protocols of biopower by offering a space to develop ideas of possibilities which can enable new demands for everyday life that are incompatible with such protocols. You see me standing here, but you also see my avatar, who exists in a world with different possibilities; you see the self I have created in a different world and the merging of those possibilities in my desire and agency.

Perhaps this notion of the transreal has an even broader significance for understanding contemporary phenomena. For example, during my performance of Becoming Dragon, I used voice chat in Second Life. Visitors to the real space would see me turn my head when someone entered the virtual room and start talking to the virtual visitor. In this way, I was often engaged in two or more conversations at once, including text chat windows. Yet one could see this experience as a hyper-extension of the daily experience that people have when talking to someone face to face and texting on their cell phones, an experience of managing multiple identities and conversations at once across multiple realms of telematic space or multiple communicative strata.

[ http://ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=639#bio ]

Extended-Body: Interview with Stelarc

Through Stelarc's work, we reach a second level of existence where the body becomes the object for physical and technical experiments in order to discover its limitations. When Stelarc speaks of the "obsolete body" he means that the body must overcome centuries of prejudices and begin to be considered as an extendible evolutionary structure enhanced with the most disparate technologies, which are more precise, accurate and powerful: "the body lacks of modular design," "Technology is what defines the meaning of being human, it's part of being human." Especially living in the information age, "the body is biologically inadequate."

For Stelarc, "Electronic space becomes a medium of action rather than information".

CTHEORY: When did you first decide to hang yourself between two different worlds - to place your body between two levels of existence...

Stelarc: Well you have to remember the suspension events weren't the initial, sort of primitive and physically difficult events and the technology ones were the more recent, more sophisticated ones. In fact, the third hand project begins a year after the first suspension event. These things were happening simultaneously. On the one hand you were discovering the psychological and physical limitations of the body. On the other you were developing strategies for extending and enhancing it through technology. I've always used technology in my performances. The very first things I made in art school were helmets and goggles that altered your binocular perception which stylistically has this connection with virtual reality head-mounted displays and compartments which were whole body pods that you sort of plugged you whole body into, and that was assaulted by electronic sounds and lights.

CTHEORY: When people see your suspension events, they immediately think of Hindu, American Indian, or other rituals. Which of these practices did you come into contact with first?

Stelarc: It was the Hindu Indian ones that I knew about, but one has to put this into the context that for 5 years I was doing suspension events with ropes and harnesses, with a lot of technology. Laser eyes were first used when the body was suspended, oh, '70, '71 that sort of time scale, but one of the sort of visual disadvantages of all this paraphernalia was that there was all this visual clutter: all the ropes and harnesses were seen more to support the body than to suspend it, so when I first came across the notion of piercing the skin, I thought, if you could suspend the body using techniques like these, then you would have a minimum of support, you'd have just the insertion and single cable. Mind you, I never hid, there was no desire to make the suspension a kind of image of levitation. For me the cables were lines of tension which were part of the visual design of the suspended body, and the stretched skin was a kind of gravitational landscape. This is what it took for a body to be suspended in a 1-G gravitational field. The other context is the primal desire for floating and flying. A lot of primal rituals have to do with suspending the body, but in the 20th century we have the reality of astronauts floating in zero-G. So the suspension event is between those sort of primal yearnings, and the contemporary reality. Of course, suspension means between two states, so I think there is an interesting linguistic meaning that fits in with the idea of suspending the body. For me there was no religious context, no shamanistic yearnings, no yogic conditioning that had to do with these performances. In fact, they occurred in the same kind of stream of consciousness. In mean, I don't take any anaesthetics, I don't chant or get into altered states. I think metaphysically, in the past, we've considered the skin as surface, as interface. The skin has been a boundary for the soul, for the self, and simultaneously, a beginning to the world. Once technology stretches and pierces the skin, the skin as a barrier is erased.

CTHEORY: You always work with your body. Your body is your form of representation, your medium. How do you feel being both an artist and an artwork?

Stelarc: It's interesting you've pointed that out, I've never felt that I am the artwork. In fact the reason why my performances are focused on this particular body is that it is difficult for me to convince other bodies to undergo rather awkward, difficult and sometimes painful experiences. This body is just merely the convenient access to a body for particular events and actions. So I've really never been obsessed by the fact that somehow I am the artwork because I don't critique it in that way.

For me the body is an impersonal, evolutionary, objective structure. Having spent two thousand years prodding and poking the human psyche without any real discernible changes in our historical and human outlook, we perhaps need to take a more fundamental physiological and structural approach, and consider the fact that it's only through radically redesigning the body that we will end up having significantly different thoughts and philosophies. I think our philosophies are fundamentally bounded by our physiology; our peculiar kind of aesthetic orientation in the world; our peculiar five sensory modes of processing the world; and our particular kinds of technology that enhance these perceptions. I think a truly alien intelligence will occur from an alien body or from a machine structure. I don't think human beings will come up with fundamentally new philosophies. An alien species may not have the same notions about the universe at all. The desire for unity may well be the result of our rather fragmentary sensory system where we observe the world sensually in packets of discrete and different sensory modes. So our urge to merge, our urge to unify, that religious, spiritual, coming together might very well be due to an inadequacy or an incompleteness in our physiology.

[ http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/stelarc/a29-extended_body.html ]

Man marries videogame character in Japan

taken from boing boing [ http://boingboing.net/2009/11/24/footage-from-the-fir.html ]

On Sunday, a man named Sal9000 married the love of his life. Her name is Nene Anegasaki, and she lives inside of a Nintendo DS video game called Love Plus. The wedding took place during a Make: Japan meet-up held at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. In attendance were a live audience, an MC, the bride's virtual video game girlfriend — who made a speech — and a real human priest.

The event was livecast on Nico Nico Douga, a popular video sharing web site that I wrote about in Wired Magazine back in 2008. (Watch this clip of hot shot Wired folks making total fools of themselves on Nico Nico Douga.)

Nico Nico Douga is home to thousands of video projects by anonymous users — mashups of original art, pop music, anime, and web memes that only an insider to Japanese web geek culture can completely decipher. Sal9000 is an active member of the Nico Nico Douga community, so it was important to him that his offbeat wedding ceremony was broadcast on the site. The footage seen here of Sal and Nene tying the knot between real and virtual is a highly imaginative, multimedia project orchestrated by a guy determined to officiate his devotion to his video game, and to pay homage to the otaku subculture that nurtures this type of creativity. Enjoy!